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Some agencies regularly send their U.S. girls to Europe to work, the way well-to-do parents once sent their daughters to finishing school. Manhattan, where fees and competition are generally twice as stiff as they are elsewhere, is the unquestioned capital of this gaudy world, and it is assumed that those with the right stuff will return there. In the meantime, says Casablancas, whose wars with the established feudalists did a lot to raise both the price and the gross receipts of modeling in Manhattan, "you send a girl over to Europe who's a little bit heavy, clumsy, a little cataloguish, pretty but not refined. European men are important abrasives in the finishing process; they tend to be male chauvinists, and "although that attitude has its disadvantages here, it gives the model an awareness of her femininity, which is an indispensable quality for her."
What is seen as clumsiness on the fast track of Manhattan is likely to be regarded in Europe as the freshness and innocence of an infant civilization and in Japan as exoticism. Editors and advertisers in both places are delighted. As Henry James and others have observed, American female innocence tends to spoil within hours if left unrefrigerated in Europe, so the supply never equals the demand. French model agents in particular regularly scout provincial talent suppliers in the U.S. As might be expected, blue-eyed blonds, undiscovered Christie Brinkleys with brows as broad and untracked as the Great Plains in 1820, interest the foreign raiding parties most. In Paris and Rome, brunettes, with a few exceptions, are only mildly exciting, unless they have black skins andean be regarded as exotics, like the exquisitely attenuated Somalian, Iman, or her friend, the first black superstar, Beverly Johnson.
In West Germany runway models, native and foreign, do not often pose in the studios, and it is they who, as mannequins traditionally are supposed to do, spend their nights in discos and their long weekends at Gstaad or the Costa Smeralda. The American photo models, at least in a widely sworn-to stereotype, are highly professional and somewhat alarming creatures who arrive punctually, work hard and project such Teutonic brown qualities as hair in youth, curlers vivacity, and radiance and good humor. They fit in well with the businesslike atmosphere of the German studios. Off-camera, they baffle local playboys with their armor of innocence and independence, and by going to bed early and alone.